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This Week in Google 274 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It’s time for TWIG: This Week in
Google. Lots of updates in Google Land. Matt Cutts will join us and talk about his leave of absence and
what’s next for Matt, our favorite Googler. And,
we’ll find out what Google found in the seat cushions. You won’t believe it. It’s
all next on TWIG.

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This is TWIG, This Week in Google
Episode 274, recorded November 5, 2014.

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It’s time for TWIG: This Week in Google, the show that covers Google, the
Cloud, which could include Facebook, Twitter, and even I guess Microsoft azure.
If it’s in the cloud, we’ll cover it. Gina Trapani is here from ThinkUp.com,
Founding Editor of LifeHacker, host of All About Android. You guys had a great show yesterday with MyriamJouire, that was great to see her.

Gina
Trapani: Yeah, it was a great show. We always have fun on All About Android.

Leo: Also here,
Jeff Jarvis, from the City University of New York, in his office at CUNY at
Times Square.

Jeff
Jarvis: I just got something exciting today. I got my new book.

Leo: Oh my!

Gina: Oh,
congratulations!

Leo: Geeks
Bearing Gifts; Imagining New Futures for News. Where can we get that book, Jeff
Jarvis?

Leo: Welcome,
Matt! I almost said Googler Matt Cutts,
but you’re on a leave of absence right now, which seems to be going on.

Matt: Yeah, it’s
very relaxing.

Leo: It’s that
nice. Matt, as many of you know by now, Matt is an early employee at Google who
does such a great job fighting spam on the search results. The story at search
engine land was that you are on a leave of absence which you may extend into
next year.

Matt: Yeah, so
Google has been really generous. They occasionally will let folks go on leave
for up to three months. That would have been earlier in October, and I talked
to them and there is still some stuff that I am working on and that my family
needs me for, so we’re extending that leave into 2015.

Leo: Has it
been nice?

Matt: Well, it
has been good. I have got to go on an Alaskan cruise with my family, and visit
Portland for xoxo and New York. It’s been wonderful,
but the other good thing is that the team is in really good hands. There is a
strong deep bench of people who really know how to fight spam well, both on the
algorithmic side and on the manual side. They don’t need me there, and they’ve
been doing a great job while I’m on leave.

Leo: I think
you’re just being a great husband.

Matt: (laughs) I’m
trying to rack up husband points, we’ll see.

Leo: You write
on your blog, actually you wrote this back on July when you announced the
leave. “When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for four
to five years.” How many years was it?

Matt: It’s been
14 now.

Leo: (laughs). Okay.
“And then she would get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as
last month and as early as 2006. Now, almost 15 years later, I’m going to take
a little time off.” Do they call it a sabbatical? It’s kind of like a
sabbatical.

Matt: Technically,
they call it a leave, but the HR department at Google is very good at trying to
work with people and trying to figure out what’s the best way to make things
work for everybody involved.

Leo: And you’re
not checking your work email at all?

Matt: I’ve done
a pretty good job of not replying to work email. It’s really hard to not even
read work email, and it’s especially hard not to read Google News, because I’m
incredibly interested in all of that stuff in the cloud and everything going
on. So I still kind of read all the things going on in Europe, and the NSA news
and all that sort of stuff.

Leo: You really
look like Dr. Evil in that chair.

Gina: I know, I love that. I love the
Dr. Evil. It’s nice, it’s like Matt on leave with Dr.
Evil (laughs)

Matt: One
million dollars, yes. She does this all the time. Emmy loves to perch on me and
she’ll walk around the house.

Leo: That’s the
perfect cat.

Matt: She has
enjoyed me being around the house more.

Leo: I wish
cats liked me more, but they could really take me or leave me.

Matt: You have
the smell of dog on you.

Leo: Yeah, the
dog, oh, is that why?

Matt: Yeah.

Leo: They sense Ozzy?

Matt: Yeah.

Leo: Yeah. I
think it’s more about the cat than anything else.

Gina: (laughs)
Matt, I think it’s great that you’re extending your leave. Not speaking just totally
generally, I feel like the work/life balance thing is one of the dirty little
secrets of our industry. I think it’s just so easy to get sucked into, there’s
so many exciting things going on, especially in your position at Google. There
are so many things, it’s so easy to get sucked into
work. I think it’s great that you are taking a break. We know you as the face
of Google, as so many people do. Also, I like when you’re just Matt. I love
you’re 30 days experiment stuff. I love your personal blog when you are writing
about your own stuff. I’m all for you being maximum Matt, even if that means
out of the context at Google, it’s great.

Matt: Thank you
so much. Gina is doing a 30 day challenge, or has been writing a lot more on
scribbling.net and that inspired me. So, my 30 day challenge this month is to
write at least once a day. I have been warming up with little simple stuff, and
it’s good. There is sort of a renaissance of people like Andy Bayo and a bunch of people writing more often on their own
blogs. That’s a good thing, too.

Leo: If only
the blog would come back, if only.

Gina: (laughs) I
have actually failed miserably at doing every single day, but I decided it’s
not going to be an absolute pass/fail thing. It’s going to be an ongoing just
if I didn’t do it yesterday, do it today anyway kind of thing. I tend to get
into that geeky engineering thing where I’m like, well I failed. The whole
thing is broken. I didn’t do it. (laughs)

Matt: Yes. I
know exactly what you mean.

Gina: I’m going
to just try again, try again today.

Jeff: What have
some of your challenges been since you’ve been gone, Matt?

Leo: Well
here’s one. It’s his Halloween costume.

Matt: (laughs) Oh
dear, yes. (laughing)

Leo:Edvard Munch’s, the Scream.

Matt: I’ve been
playing around with a projector and canvases. There is also one I did about the
Shining, which really makes me look crazy. I think the SEO’s, the Search Engine
Optimizers, they love whenever I act like a dinosaur or something because they
get to use…. (laughing)

Leo: Here’s
Johnny!! Wow!

Gina: Wow! That’s
amazing!

Leo: Wow! I
think you need to go back to work soon, Matt.

Matt: Yeah,
maybe so.

Leo: All work
and no play makes Matt a dull boy. Wow! You can’t bring a projector with you on
Halloween?

Matt: No, but
what I did for the Scream was I projected the painting on a canvas and then I
traced it. Then I repainted the Scream myself. If you get up close it’s really
awful quality, but it’s like a paint by numbers
version of the Scream. (laughing)

Leo: Which is
the real one?

Matt: In fact, I
have the canvas with me. You can see the whole where I would stick my head. It’s
pretty fun to just tinker around, make the sunset look about the right amount
and all that sort of stuff.

Gina: This is
exclusive content here you guys.

Leo: Nobody
else has this! Whooeee!

Gina: The making
of….(laughs)

Leo:Whoooeee! So, you decided not to do the hang in there
kitten poster, I take it?

Matt: No, that
was a failed experiment. I’m trying to be more okay with publicly failing. I
did a blog post about hitting the wall at a recent marathon and how long that
was.

Leo: So, do you
think you will go back in the same role at Google, do you think? Or maybe this
is a chance for you to try something else?

Matt: Well, I
have been impressed with how well everyone else on the team is doing. It has
created a little bit of an opportunity for them to try new things, explore
different stuff, approach problems from a different way, and so we will have to
see how it goes. I love the part of my job that dealt with keeping an eye on
what important news was happening related to Google. It’s not clear that having
me as a lightning rod for unhappy black cat SEO’s is the best use of anybody’s
time compared to working on other things that could be making the world better
for Google or in general. We will see how it all plays out.

Leo: What an
opportunity to be at somewhere like Google and obviously you have their trust
and say maybe I want to try my hand at that. Do you actually get to do that? You
are senior enough now. You must be able to say, could I do this?

Matt: The
interesting thing is at Google they try and get you to go and do different
projects. The product managers, they encourage you to rotate every two or three
years. It’s relatively rare to find people who have been around forever in a
specific area. You will find Ahmad in Search, Streedar in Ads, some of these people that are really, really senior, higher ranking
than me for sure. They do stick around in one area, but a lot of other people
jump to different parts of the company to burnish different skills and try
different things, which is a pretty good idea I think.

Leo: We talked
last week, didn’t we, about those poor Facebook posts that have to look at all
the crap.

Jeff: Yeah.

Leo: We thought
of you, Matt, because it’s like, Matt has to do a little bit of that too. Although
we figured that by now you have minions who will be actually looking at the
spam.

Matt: I prefer
colleagues, but ….(laughing)

Gina: We weren’t
commenting on somebody’s disposition.

Leo: How does
he stay so happy?

Gina: In the
face of the underbelly of the Internet, even as an abstract. Even
if you are not deleting child porn manually yourself, Matt. (laughs)

Matt: Yeah. I
just have so much admiration. For example, last year there was a real effort on
child porn because of some stuff that happened in the United Kingdom. A lot of
people chipped in and that is not an easy job at all. You have to think hard
about how you are going to tackle those kind of
things.

Leo: Yeah, I
bet.

Jeff: You’re
kind of a polymath. You’ve been in the same department. What other things
interest you, Matt?

Matt: Oh man. I
was computer graphics and actually inertial trackers and accelerometers in grad
school.

Leo: Really?

Matt: At one
point I said, you could use commodity hardware, but as a grad student you don’t
have the access to influence anybody’s mind. Why don’t I just go do something
else for 10 years and somebody else will come up with all these sensors. And
sure enough, you’ve got Connect, the Wii, the iPhone. Now everybody’s got a
computer in their pocket that can do 3D sensing as long as you write the
computer programs well. So there is all kinds of
interesting stuff you could do.

Leo: Andy Rubin
has left Google. Of course, he was the guy that created Android and brought it
to Google. He ran Android for some time. Last year, he left and went to robotics, we think it was in the Google products stuff. And
now he is going off to do something probably robotics related on his own. I
think it’s not usual. In fact, the commentary when he left was this is normal. This
is what happens. In some ways, we hope this is what happens is that people kind
of grow and move on maybe to others things. They kind of extend the Google
connections out into the rest of the world. You won’t leave Google, though.

Gina: Let’s not
put Matt on the spot.

Leo: Oh, I want
to put him on the spot.

Gina: The poor
guy. (laughs)

Matt: I’ll
always have a connection and a soft spot for Google in my heart.

Leo: I think
that’s the idea right? That these people….

Matt: Yeah, it’s
fun to watch a TWIG or two ago, you know I listen while running to This Week in
Google. It’s really fun to hear how you guys interpret various things in the
criminology of trying to reverse engineer why this person is doing that or
something. It’s really fun. It’s definitely the case. This
interview with Larry Pages in the Financial Times.

Leo: Right.

Matt: It’s neat
to have that perspective of maybe a little bit better guess of what Larry was
thinking about.

Leo: That was
really a great interview, and I think it is probably timed around SundarPichai’s promotion and the
idea that Larry will have fewer direct reports and be able to think more about
the high level stuff, freeing himself to think big is the how the Financial
Times put it.

Jeff: My
favorite part of this was saying, you can’t imagine a bigger mission statement
than Google’s, yet he wants a bigger mission.

Leo: Right. The
original mission was to organize all of the world’s information and make it
accessible, universally accessible and useful. That’s pretty big.

Jeff: Yeah.

Gina: It’s a
function of cash flow. I actually love Google, obviously I do this show. I
think the intentions are good. Google has a great business with lots of money
in the bank. It gives them the opportunity to look at those big challenges, and
I’m so glad that they are. There are very few companies that can make that
leap, make those kinds of impacts.

Leo: I think
that’s kind of exactly what Larry said when The Times if he asked him what the
new mission statement would be, he said, well we still trying to work that out.
We have 62 billion dollars in cash. We’re in a bit of uncharted territory. We
are trying to figure it out. How do we use all of these resources and have a
more positive impact on the world. Boy that would be a fun company to be at I
think, Matt.

Gina: It’s filed
under good problems to have, right?

Leo: If you
trust Google. Now, I have to say, I’m reading a book, a good book called
Whiskey Tango Fox Trot.

Jeff: It’s a fun
book, yeah.

Leo: Have you
read it? I’m reading it right now. I don’t know the end of it so I can’t spoil
it for you. It’s a novel about a company, actually a consortium of the biggest
data companies in the world who just basically say, forget the NSA, we’re going
to collect everything about everybody and store it. It’s one of those, it’s
like the worst paranoid fantasy, so if you are a
privacy buff or privacy advocate, this is what you fear.

Jeff: Yeah, but
as opposed to other novels of the current time, this one had a right touch and
it was fun.

Leo: Oh, I love
it.

Jeff: That
attitude drives me nuts. I enjoyed the book a lot.

Leo: I think it
is pretty clear that the evil person in the book is kind of a Bill Gates type
working in a Google type company would be my play on it. These are the fears I
think some people have, yes? That Google might have an overarching ambition
that goes beyond what we’re comfortable with.

Jeff: I read
another one recently which was the opposite. I can’t remember the title right
now, in which the opposite happens. Everything gets controlled and we don’t get
the freedom to share, and dystopia has its alternate number.

Leo: Right. And
there is always the extreme. I’m not going to ask Matt this, because this would
put him on the spot. Obviously you trust Google because you work there. You,
more than many are inside Google, and understand a little bit more what the
motivations are, right?

Matt: it’s
interesting too, because I think a lot of people view Google as a monolith and
I tend to view it more like almost like separate silos. There is search, there
is Chrome, there is Android, there is social or Google+, there is YouTube. Each
silo or department, whatever you want to call it, within the company is good at
certain things and not as good at other things. Search is fantastic at
artificial intelligence, machine learning, as it relates to search at least,
and handling things really, really fast. Whereas, two or three generations ago
when you went to go order your Nexus 4, maybe the store could hint the load or
something like that. The people are good at other things. I think at least, I
can only speak for core search, but one of the things that core search has
always believed in is trying to have a level playing field. Things like take
out so it you don’t like Google you can leave. This forces us to be honest. I
totally understand why some people are worried about ambition or disruption,
but as long as a company has to earn your loyalty and there is not lock in, it
is to me a big promise that makes it such that you don’t have to work at Google
for 14 years to know that it is trustworthy.

Leo: Because I
know you and I trust you, I do trust Google. But I have to say, when your
mission goes from, we just want to be great search and organize the world’s
information, something that everybody can get behind, to now we’ve got a lot of
money, so let’s get more ambitious. It starts to raise a little bit of a red flag.

Jeff: No, I
think it’s the opposite. I thought that it was saying, now we have a responsibility to give back and to use science and engineering to
solve problems and do neat things and help.

Leo: Yeah, but
who decides, the government does it, I don’t know either. But who decides what
is altruistic for a societal benefit? The guy with the money.The guys writing the check.

Matt: Yeah, but
that is one thing that I do love about Larry is that he wants to make a big
difference. Maybe not just one dent in the universe, but maybe multiple dents
in the universe. His mode of thinking from the outside from what I can tell
seems to be, okay, what’s causing the biggest suffering? What do people die of?
What is causing the most harm? And he did a pretty good job of enunciating that
in his Financial Times interview and he’s done those interviews with Ted. And
if those are the kinds of motives, then you can understand. Self
driving cars, a lot of people die because of car accidents. Or trying to tackle disease or these new nano particles that can go around and spot diseases much earlier. It seems
like there are so many moon shots, or ten times improvements that everybody
would be like, yes, healthier people. Then you can certainly argue over the
relative priorities of some stuff but there is still a lot of not low hanging
fruit, but seemingly mission impossible things that have yet to really be
tackled the way they could be tackled.

Leo: I would
hope that he has good advisors and is doing this. I’ll give you an example of
something that worried me a little bit in the FT article. He says, given the
chance to give up work, nine out of ten people “wouldn’t want to be doing what
they are doing today.” That’s, yes, but that’s nine out of ten people who are
out of work.

Jeff: He
predicts radical deflation. I asked….

Leo: Uh, oh. Frozen Jeff.

Gina: I’m glad
it’s not just me.

Leo: Now, it’s
Jeff. You asked Mark Andreason what?

Jeff: Larry also
talked about radical deflation.

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: Prices
will go down with greater efficiency. Well that could bring some really
disruptive forces into society and may not be all good. But he saw it as a
positive saying that things will get cheaper, people will have more time. This
people will have more time probe has been predicted often. I don’t know that is
true or not, but I do agree that as you’ve heard me say on the show, technology
leads to efficiency over growth. I think that is part of what he is saying.

Matt: Jeff, you
had a really good piece from 2011 called Jobless Future. I think that basically
talks about how technology leads to all kinds of improvements, but not
automatically to more jobs.

Jeff: Exactly.

Matt: Eric
Schmidt gets this reputation for saying things that are true but maybe not as
polite or something like that. You’ve got government saying we are going to
create as many jobs as possible. I think the technologists
are like, is the objective to create jobs or is the objective to do the
best possible thing that you can do. Yes, there’s absolutely some tension
inherent there. Leo, you’re right to put your thumb on it and say, wait a
second. What if you are a telephone operator, truck driver, and suddenly
switching is automatic. Or in 50 years, computers can drive cars more
effectively. I think that is totally fair to ask.

Leo: Yeah, and
he says you can’t wish these things away because they are going to happen. You
are going to have some very amazing capabilities in the economy when we have
computers that can have more and more jobs. He is trying to change how we thing
about work. There is no way around it. You can’t wish it away. Those are the
right words, and I would hope he would start to think about what happen. I
don’t think the answer is, this is fine because
everything is going to get so cheap that you don’t need a job is not an answer
that I think a lot of people want to hear.

Matt: Yeah, I
personally agree with you. I think saying that there is disruption coming in
the future and that is a two edge sword. Disruption helps in a lot of ways, and
disruption hurts a lot of incumbents and hurts a lot of industries, and can
hurt people if they don’t prepare for it. Maybe the next part of that could be, how do we all talk about or be in the conversation of
how to prepare for that together.

Jeff: I agree
and I think that you have my friends in publishing, especially German
publishing, who go after Google as if that was our money. You took it away from
us. You owe us something. I couldn’t disagree with that more. But I would agree
that having had a disruptive impact on for example, news, and the media
industry. I think Google has some, if not moral, than an ethical
responsibility, an opportunity to help rethink the future. You have Larry Page
having tremendous gifts, gifts of intellect, gifts of his fields of science,
and now gifts of cash. I’m not saying he should give it to CUNY. It’s not my
Bill Gates thing. I would argue that what we need in these industries is the
best of Silicon Valley’s innovation and investment, to rethink what they ought
to be, what the can be. Not the current players, not the legacy players. There
is no right that they should continue in their old power. But, for Google to
tackle big questions like how do we solve disease? How do we stop people from
dying in cars? How do we have a more informed society? Things like that I think
is now the kind of give back. And you can do it in Bill Gates way, where you
say I have a big bucket load of money and I’m going to put my smarts to using
it that way. Or you could do what I think Larry is doing, and say while I’m
still in this company, while I have this incredible power house, how can we
harness that?

Leo: That’s the
difference that scares me a little bit. I’m going to call on you, the
historian, Jeff, because there have been plutocrats before there were the
robber barons. There have been very, very wealthy men before. I think Bill
Gates is one model where you make a pile of money, you put it in the bank, and
then you retire and give it to charity. What he is doing is not to build a
business around that, but just giving it all away. What Larry is proposing is a
little more scary to me. I wonder if there is a
precedent to this where you have somebody like Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, these
very extraordinary, and I guess, I don’t know about Apple. I don’t know if
there is a guy at Apple like that, I guess not. But there is extraordinary
wealthy guys, who instead of saying, I’m just going to make this money, put it
in the bank and then when I retire give it away, who say I am going to rebuild
society.

Jeff: Easy. Henry
Ford, Thomas Edison.

Leo: And what
happened?

Jeff: Thomas
Edison invented a whole bunch of cool stuff.

Leo: And got
very wealthy. And what did he do with the money? Did he say, now I’m going to
change the world in a new, in my own vision?

Jeff: He kept
doing what he did to improve the world.

Leo: He kept
inventing.

Jeff: Yes.

Leo: Now Henry
Ford was more of the mega maniac style where I’m going to reinvent the world.

Jeff: He was
sort of the new utopia in Brazil. It didn’t work out so great.

Leo: Didn’t
work out so well, did it?

Jeff: No.

Leo: No. So,
that’s what worries me is that look, Larry is obviously brilliant and I think
Google is fantastic, but I worry that somebody now has a lot of power,
influence, and money. When you’re giving money to charity, it’s a little
different because you are working within the system. It’s almost as if he wants
to create his own system.

Jeff: That’s
Bill Gates saying, okay I’m done and now I’ll take my cash lump. Don’t forget,
Bill Gates is using his intelligence and trying to change the world in
important ways with the money. The charitable system in this country isn’t all
that great. It’s more developed and better than it is in other countries. But
it has its own problems of legacy and stick in the mud, and bureaucracy and
interest and all kinds of things. Charities aren’t all wonderful.

Leo: Well, and
somebody is pointing out is the other thing Henry Ford did is he started the
Ford Foundation which to this day is really a valuable asset in the world.

Matt: I guess
the only thing I would add is that Google has a couple advantages in that
you’ve got a critical mass of smart people and they have tried to have a
culture of don’t be evil. You can argue over individual incidents and whether
this specific thing is evil or that specific thing is evil. Google as a whole,
whenever I look at the DNA, the people try to do the right things. If you got
Larry marching off in one direction and you’ve got the rest of the company
saying, no we disagree. They drag their heels and they create friction. That,
in my opinion, helps to move things towards a consensus toward a middle ground
that works pretty well. Having that critical mass of smart people lets you say,
now I can do voice recognition better, now I can do
image recognition better and I can unlock all kinds of good applications to
improve the world that way.

Jeff: That’s one
way of looking at it.

Matt: It’s a
tough call. Like Gina says, it’s a good problem to have I guess.

Gina: It’s like
when you get on a Unix system for the first time. It’s
like the thing you say with great power comes great responsibility. I think the
fear is like, what are they going to do? Are they going to be responsible? I
like the idea that there is checks and balances and
there is critical mass of smart people. The evil thing is like technology, the
thing that I have understood, I am very pro technology and I am reminded of
constantly is that technology itself isn’t good or evil, it just is. It’s what
you do with it. There is a lot of nuance around that. I like that Google
aspires to don’t be evil, but I think it really comes down to folks feeling
there is this weird fear of the powerful nerd thing, the I read your email
t-shirt. I think society or culture is going to outgrow that to some degree,
especially when these legacy institutions sort of die
off and we move forward. I think some of the distrust is kind of like there are
a lot of opportunities here for one company to change the world, and let’s hope
it’s in the best ways.

Leo: Also, from
this Financial Times article, Page relates frequent debate he said he had with
Steve Jobs who died three years ago. Page said he would always tell me, you’re
doing too much stuff to Google. Page would say, I would be like, you’re not doing enough stuff. The argument he made to jobs is it’s
unsatisfying to have all these people and we have all these billions we should
be investing to make people’s lives better. If we just did the same things we
have done before and don’t do something new, it seems like a crime to me.

Jeff: I think
that’s important. There is another model here, Leo, which is Bell Labs. Bell
Labs did fund a good deal of pure research that led to…astronomy had nothing to
do with Bell Labs. Bell Labs had astronomers there. They had amazing scientists
there. Google has phenomenal scientists and engineers there, and to unleash
their problem solving power on the problems they find and to support them while
doing that, some of those problems will solve the problems that Google has,
like cheaper power. Cheaper power is good for everybody, it’s darn good for Google. The transistor was good for everybody, and it was
good for AT&T. The network was good for everybody and AT&T didn’t
realize how good it could have been for them. We don’t have a Bell Labs now,
and another way to look at it is what if Google started beyond Project X, a
pure research arm the size of Bell Labs. That would be something.

Leo: Still a
lot of trust. Larry Page is not an elected official. Not necessarily that makes
it more trustworthy.

Jeff: All bets
are off.

Leo: I sense a
distrust of the pace of politics and the pace of government in all of Silicon
Valley. Why are you taking so long? We are just going to launch in and do it. Elon Musk, same thing. Yes. There is a reason, I believe there is a reason why government moves so slowly and deliberately.

Jeff: As slow as
ours right now?

Leo: Yeah. I
think that it’s better to move slowly than it is to move too quickly.

Jeff: In theory,
yes. But now we’re in a complete…

Leo: I think
it’s also better to reach consensus and I think the problem you have when you
have these very powerful plutocrats is they don’t need to reach consensus. This
is not an indictment of Google or Larry Page. It’s just a general fear that
you’ve got a lot of power. Just saying, don’t be evil, it’s a good start. (laughs) But it really has to be in your DNA and what is evil
and what is an evil. Ultimately, as a publicly held company, your fiduciary
responsibility is to your stakeholders.

Jeff: Right now,
there is a Foursquare conference going on in New York,
which is not Foursquare what we know, but Foursquare from Lazard. I’m missing
right Rupert Murdoch talking there.

Leo: There’s
another example.

Jeff: Of using
his money.

Leo: Too much
power.

Jeff: Which he
thinks is right, but I think is often abhorrent. It can go both ways.

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: Or,
Bloomberg used his money to become an incredible crat to run New York very well.

Leo: Did he win
his proposition to tax soda?

Jeff: I don’t
even know.

Leo: (laughs)

Matt: I think it
got overturned by a court, didn’t it?

Leo: No, no,
there was an initiative. He said, I don’t care. I’m
going to do it in an initiative. That’s a good example of a guy for some reason
has really decided that soda pop is Satan.

Gina: Is the
enemy.

Leo: Yeah.

Matt: There is
some health data that says that.

Leo: There is
something to say that.

Gina: There is
good support there.

Matt: It seems
like the saving grace for me for Google is that the for the most part, if you
don’t like it, no one comes to your house and forces you to use Google. You
have to compete on the merits and people would use other options on Gmail and
Google Docs and all of this stuff. You have to compete well. Whereas, if you are
stuck with Network Effects. Suppose you wanted to leave Facebook or Twitter. It
doesn’t matter how nice Facebook or Twitter is; if all the people are there, it’ s a little harder to leave on that.

Leo: Bloomberg’s
one cent tax on soda in Berkeley was passed. Measure D. It was in Berkeley by the way, not New York. He put the money into it.

Jeff: We are
better.

Leo: Yeah,
start with Berkeley.

Jeff: Why don’t
we tax kraut.

Leo: (laughs) It’s interesting though. Bloomberg put the money into that
Measure D because I guess he figured we will get is passed here and then slowly
stretch it across the county. I don’t want to put you in an awkward position. This
is a great article with Larry Page, and I think you are absolutely right, Matt.
It’s nice to see into what he is thinking and I hope that he remains this
public, engages the public in the conversation. I think this is something that
no one person should have too much power in. Of course he’s got the company. He
says he wants to build a bigger company than has ever been built before in a
sense. There are limits on how big companies can get. The biggest companies
“are all within an order of magnitude of the same size, certainly in market
cap.” He says, these are the limits against which his
company is pushing. You say we are going to take over all these important
things. There is no example of a company doing that. I feel like he wants to. Don’t
know.

Matt: Well, if
you want to have impact that would be the next thing.

Leo: Multiply
it.

Matt: It feels
like there is another interesting way to look at it. I’ll stop soon, but there
is forward looking and backward looking. Forward looking would be, I’m going to scan all the books and hope all the people
see the value to society by the time the case is done, which they did. And then
there is backwards looking, which is hey let’s fix money and politics or
campaign finance reform. To me, it’s a hopeful lens to look at, whether it is Elon Musk or Peter Diamandis or
Larry or Bill Gates, or whoever. It’s like forward looking versus trying to fix
the things.

Leo: Larry Lessig has spent a lot of energy trying to fix the campaign
finance system. I think that’s a worthy effort.

Matt: Yeah, oh
yeah.

Leo: I don’t
know. It makes me nervous when somebody has too much power. That’s why our
government is designed the way it is. It’s designed to be hobbled.

Jeff: But it’s
also innovation is power, right? Intelligence is power, science is power. I
just finished listening to Walter Isaacson’s book, which is good, but for you,
Leo, it will be a bi-weekly reader version of what you lived through. I had
another reaction to it, I will tell you about in a second. What strikes you is
the serendipity of really smart people solving problems and creating amazing
things out of that. That’s where the power is, far more than the capital.

Leo: Right.

Jeff: If
somebody has a killer idea, there is plenty of capital. They will go find capital.
Capital is not the limiter. It’s innovation and
problem solving.

Leo: I guess
I’m a postdate because I have for the last 30 years
said technology is great. It’s the way to go. It’s going to change everything. It’s
going to fix everything. And I too, like Larry, have said it’s inevitable. We
have to figure out what we do and not say stop it because you can’t. .

Matt: I’m going
to play devil’s advocate with you. I think modern culture is bad, competition
is good. We’ve got Microsoft, if you subscribe to Office 365, will give you
unlimited storage. Amazon just announced unlimited photo storage. That’s
competition in the cloud space. That’s great.

Leo: I love
seeing that, yes.

Matt: Yeah, and
as a search guy. I wish there were more search engines. Yahoo bought up a whole
bunch and then Microsoft partnered with Yahoo. We had like seven or ten search
engines in the early days and we don’t have the competition. There is plenty of
vibrant competition but I would love to see more. I can absolutely channel
where you are coming from on that. I think that’s important as well.

Leo: You’re not
going to see competition in search, though. (laughs) That’s
the irony of this and where you’re at now. There is no way anybody could
compete at this point.

Matt: You see
things that are coming from a different angle, like Siri.

Leo: That’s
what is going to happen. The kind of search and the kind of search that Google
does and I think this is what Larry sees is that cycle is ending. Now we have
to think of what’s next. Here is Siri as an example, social search, whatever
it’s going to be. It’s changing, right?

Matt: Yes, but
we have to be mindful. I think everybody at Google should be mindful of the
impact of their actions. I think about webmasters and if Google changes an
algorithm that can absolutely have a large impact on a site publisher. We try
to think about that we evaluate our algorithms.

Leo: Good,
good. It’s a hard thing to do, and as you get more power, even the slight as
you know. The slightest turn of the knob can make a huge impact. You got the
butterfly effect. It’s so nice to have you on here, Matt. I know we have to let
you go.

Jeff: It’s great to have you back, Matt.

Leo: I didn’t mean to get you into this
discussion here.

Matt: you know I love talking about Google
and search and all of this stuff, and I think it’s really cool because while I
as on official three month leave, Jason, Chad, nobody reached out. It’s like,
oh, I enjoy being on TWIG.

Leo: We can have you back more, anytime you
want. This could be your new job.

Gina: Yeah, we wanted to give you some space
for sure.

Leo: I shouldn’t have brought this up. I
thought, A, because everybody loves and trusts Matt Cutts.
I know you are not a spokesman for Google, but I feel like having you there
reassures me and so I wanted to hear from you reassurance that the process is
there, the collegiality, the consideration, the don’t be evil, all of that stuff is still there and still in effect.

Matt: Yeah, it still is.

Leo: That’s why we love talking to Matt. We
trust you.

Matt: Thanks so much. Sorry I have to step
off.

Leo: Come back, will you? I promise not to
bring up Google next time you’re here (laughing)

Matt: Cats, cats.

Leo: Next week, cats and Halloween costumes.

Matt: Sounds good. Take Care.

Leo: Take care. We didn’t put him on the
spot as to when he would be going back.

Jeff: 2015 is all we’ve heard.

Leo: Yes, that’s when the Apple watch will
come out as well. (laughing)

Jeff: Coincidence?

Gina: Who knows.

Leo: I think not! That’s one of the things that’s great about Matt. Everybody at Google is great that
we’ve talked to, and you’ve talked to more people than I have, Jeff and Gina. Everybody
you talk to, even SundarPichai,
the conversations we have had, I’ll never forget it about Chromebooks, was so
thoughtful, not defensive, well put. I just, everybody I have met there is very
impressive, very smart. I do trust them.

Jeff: Here’s another question, Leo. I really
would love to hear you answer this question, Gina. Let’s say you were an
employee at Google. First question, would you be an employee at Google? Let’s
just all say that we would work at Google. What would Google do that would make
you quit? I will give you one example. I think that if we found out that Google
had been willingly spying on citizens, voluntarily for the government.

Leo: Not even for the government, for their
own benefit. If you open the door to a conference room and there on the screen
are personal Skype conversations or hangouts conversations that went over the
Google network, and were ostensibly private. If I were seeing that, I would
leave.

Jeff: Like the geeks in the Good Wife.

Leo: Or maybe you wouldn’t leave. Yeah,
maybe you would be a whistle blower.

Gina: I’d like to think that I’d be snowed in
in that situation.

Jeff: As a technologist, Gina, there has to
be some description of companies that you would work for and companies you
wouldn’t work for and why. I certainly have that in journalism. Can you express
that in your world?

Gina: For me, I’m just a bad employee. This
is just something I’ve learned about myself. I want to do my own thing. I’m
just a bad employee. Even a company like Google where I feel like I would be
able to do so much, just dealing with the politics and the meetings and the
layers of managers. This would happen in any big organization. Just thinking
about it makes me kind of tired. I work well on my own and on small teams. I
prefer small teams. That’s just me personally. For me to choose a company to
work for or work with, it is a matter of alignment with my values. Is this
company doing something that I can get behind? Something that
will put my talents to best use, or the right people there. It’s a whole
list of things, and Google certainly falls under those umbrellas, but again,
it’s just my style that I like to do something kind of small and Indie and on
my own. Which arguably means that I don’t have as big of
impact, which is something I definitely struggle with. I’m sure there
are tons of projects at Google that never see the light of day either.

Leo: See that’s something that is, I have
that. That is the same thing that is driving me to distrust large companies in
general. I have a more kind of tribal, communal notion of how things should
happen. Admittedly, you’re never going ot have a Google at that scale.

Gina: Right.

Leo: I don’t trust big companies. The bigger
a company gets, I think the less trustworthy it is.

Jeff: See that’s where I….I don’t think it’s
an impossibility to have a big company you can trust.

Leo: There haven’t been many examples.

Jeff: No, it’s hard, but it’s not impossible.

Leo: (laughs) I always thought I was an optimist.

Gina: Jeff, you don’t like when people
automatically assume a company is evil based solely on a company’s bottom line
or size.

Jeff: Right. Give me the evidence. I don’t
assume somebody is evil and awful just because they are in government. I often
criticize government.

Leo: I think there are far more examples of
people who acts altruistically in government than there are of people acting
altruistically in business. Far more.

Jeff: Yeah.

Leo: Most people, I admit government
corrupts and so forth. There are lots of counter examples. Most
people that get into public service because they want to serve the public.

Jeff: And it goes south from there.

Leo: From there it’s all downhill. Our show
today…I’m not a cynic. Maybe I should be living in Europe because I believe in
government but not in corporations.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s extremely European.

Leo: Our show today brought to you by a very
nice company. (laughing) Citrix GoToMeeting. Everybody
I know has used GoToMeeting. I hope you have used GoToMeeting for a meeting. It’s
all we ever do. We love GoToMeeting. The people we work with, whether it’s clients or vendors or co-workers are almost always out
of looma. We have to be able to meet with them
without having them in our studio, and for us to
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Google. We used to, this was a call Dvorak always
made. Microsoft is getting too big. It needs to be split into three different
companies. That was more because it was unmanageable at its size, not that it
was dangerous.

Jeff: The Europeans thought it was evil and
taking over the world, and it got too big for its own good. The real question
for Google is, can it find the next thing? So far it’s
found the next things. It’s in the phone business.

Leo: Right, but none of them are businesses
yet, right? They are in these businesses and clearly planning for the future,
but really how do they make their money?

Jeff: Here is the big question. Is
advertising forever?

Leo: No.

Jeff: Google is an advertising company.

Leo: Not that kind of advertising, not
display ads. I don’t know but I think Larry Page is smart not to assume that
this business is going to continue this way forever, and that’s why they have
so many projects. For a purely business point of view.

Gina: Right, cover all of your bases. See
what works.

Leo: Yep. Do you think Matt will go back? He
was cagey.

Jeff: You let him off the hook.

Leo: I let him off the hook. I didn’t want
to be mean.

Gina: I don’t think he’s made a decision yet,
but I do think it’s a very good possibility that he won’t go back, and I think
that’s okay.

Jeff: If I worked for Google…

Gina: It would be interesting to see what
Matt Cutts would do outside of Google. Wouldn’t that
be interesting?

Jeff: Is he a startup kind of guy? He has
been there 15 years. That’s difficult. Here we are speculating on that without
him being here.

Gina: Poor Matt.

Leo: That’s because I didn’t want to have this
conversation in front him. I didn’t want to put him on the spot.

Jeff: The question for me is if you are
Google and you have a talent like Matt. Matt is talented in so many ways, not
just technologically but also, trust is a talent of Matt’s.

Leo: Huge! Even if he is
just a spokesman.

Jeff: If whatever. Or an advisor, so what I
would hope for Google is I would hope that some top manager would go to Matt,
take him out to lunch and say, challenge yourself. What
do you want to do?

Leo: I guarantee you they will do that. And
Google has a well-known history of writing very large checks saying, look,
don’t leave. Here is fifteen million dollars, one million for every year.

Gina: Oh man. I hope that happens for him.

Leo: Gina, you who are unemployable. Is
there a number that somebody could write you a check and you would say,
alright, I don’t want to work for you but…

Gina: I would love to sit here and say that
no one could afford me , but the truth is, everyone
has a price. I’m not a wealthy person. I’m a working person. Would I love to
have F’u kind of money? Of course I would.

Leo: Keep your purity. You want to be poor. You
want to have to work hard. Trust me.

Gina: I’ll le tyou know when I have this option and it’s not just a thought exercise.

Leo: Did they put that thing on Ozzy’s head or did you? Bring Ozzy here. Ozzy’s come back from his groomers. Did the
groomer do that? Oh my God.

Gina: Oh my gosh!

Jeff: You’ve immasculated poor Ozzy!

Leo: You’ve immasculated…there,
that’s better.

Gina: That’s adorable.

Leo: Turned into a bambooshka.
I was sitting this morning, Google has now said if you go to play.google.com,
Google Store, and you click on devices. They say, come back every Wednesday
because we will have five more, or I don’t know what, we will have more Nexus
6’s for sale.

Gina: And nothing?

Leo: No!

Gina: Not today.

Leo: I sat there, I had read this. It says, we are getting more Nexus 6 devices in stock as soon as
possible. To make things simpler for you, we will make more devices available
each Wednesday and encourage you to visit the site. What is today? Wednesday. So this morning I got up at 8:00 and did this,
you know this Jason.

Gina: The dance.

Leo: The dance. Refresh. Refresh. It said we
are out of inventory. And then I don’t know why, but all of a sudden on a black
32 gigabyte, it said ships in one to two weeks.

Jason: What cracks me up about this is that not only is it difficult to get any, but once you
get through on one configuration, it might not be the one you intended. Because
it is so hard to get one, you get one anyways.

Leo: I did! I didn’t want a 32 gig black, I wanted a 64 gig white.

Jason: Exactly.

Leo: But I ordered it, and guess what? Delivery, November 21st, same as yours.

Jason: Yeah, it’s looking that that’s the
time. Just a tip.

Gina: Nice.

Jeff: So they didn’t really get any more in
stock.

Leo: I don’t know.

Jeff: They ordered a week ago and you have
the same delivery date. Scam.

Leo: No, no, no. They were looking in the
cracks of the couch, and they found….

Jason: Hey what do you know, we found a couple
of Nexus 6’s here. (laughing)

Leo: It did make me mad. I thought, I’m not going to get a Nexus 6. I do not want to add up
how much I have spent on phones in the last two months.

Gina: Oh man, Leo. You’re phone budget must
be….and the plans!!

Leo: I don’t know, but I feel like I kind of
have to. You can get these devices sometimes from the carriers so they are
always carrier devices. For a week or two, and then you have to send it back,
so you really don’t commit to you. I don’t feel like that is a good way to
review it. Yet, I now have, you should see my desk. It’s littered with iPhone
6, 6+, MotoX2014.

Jeff: Do you call the phone company every
time to change the ABI?

Leo: One plus one. Well, I do a lot of SIM
card swapping when I can.

Jeff: Yeah, I know but when you change the
SIM card in a phone it has a new ABI.

Leo: No, you don’t have to do that most of
the time. I got this. This is the Droid Turbo, which is a MotoX on steroids. It actually looks a little swollen because they put a much bigger
battery in here. My complaint on the 2014 MotoX was
that it didn’t get through the day. It got about 12 hours battery life.

Jeff: It this only Verizon phone?

Leo: Yeah, which is a
bummer.Because it is a Droid. Although, the
rumor is they will be selling it as the Droid Max internationally. It is
identical to a MotoX. Here’s the good news. In terms
of software, almost all of the MotoX features made it
over the Droid Turbo except for, and I don’t know how important this is. MiriumSchwar was talking about
this yesterday. It doesn’t have the aluminum bandwidth, the carefully tuned
antenna thing, where two antenna. It only has one antenna so you can’t talk and
data at the same time. That’s also a disadvantage.

Jeff: Oh, that’s a bummer.

Leo: I don’t care about that. But it has a
21 megapixel camera, which doesn’t look any better.

Jeff: I haven’t really done a full testing,
but ….

Gina: Megapixels don’t matter.

Leo: I don’t think they matter. It’s the
same MotoX camera thing. I have some pictures I will
show you. I don’t know. In good light, if you hold it really carefully steady,
it looks pretty good. The pictures I took of you guys didn’t.

Jason: We don’t take very good pictures to
begin with.

Leo: It was a front facing selfie, right? This
is a good example in daylight. It is obviously high res. It’s 6.2 megabytes as a JPEG 5248 X 2952. The detail is quite good. Of course,
Google “enhanced it”. This is lowlight, and fuzzy there. A
little grainy. You can see that grain, can’t you?

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: This is F2, ISO 1600, 1/15 of a second
exposure. It did the best it could. This is at night. That’s not a great
picture.

Jason: Yeah, a little fuzzy.

Leo: That’s a selfie, remember, so that’s
the front facing camera.

Jason: Right.

Leo: So it’s not quite as good. In fact,
that’s only a megabyte in size.

Jason: You can blame us a little bit for
breaking the sensor in the camera with our smiles.

Leo: 1900 X 1080, that’s just bad. There you
go, this is from the front. That looks pretty good.

Gina: That’s a pretty good picture, yeah.

Leo: Yeah. Color is excellent. There you
are, Gina. This is of All About Android last night. I
think it’s a good camera. I still think the Note 4 is a better camera. Unfortunately,
you have to use the Samsung stuff.

Jeff: I actually am a little tempted by it. The
software on it for changing settings and aperture and all of that is actually
kind of neat. I was surprised that Samsung hasn’t brought it into more of what
they do.

Leo: But it’s like jelly bean or something,
isn’t it?

Jeff: Yeah it is, it’s jelly bean. But you’re not using it as imaging other than the camera.

Leo: Well the main reason is I wanted to get
this Nexus 6. It’s silly. It’s a camera with an Android phone on it in the
back. Built into it. It would be a good camera I
guess. You know, if you really want a camera, get a
camera. Don’t worry about the Android. Just get a camera. There are good
cameras out there. The reason I wanted a Nexus 6 is because I wanted Lollipop. Now
I have a Nexus 7, I suppose some people bought a Nexus 9, the new tablet, to
get Lollipop. Are the Nexus 9’s arriving? They are. Lollipop is out.

Jason: Mine was supposed to get here
yesterday. Not arrived. Waiting for it today. You
know, hard knock life.

Leo: (singing) It’s a hard knock life. Yeah, we’re complaining about having too many phones and
getting them a day late.

Gina: First world problems.

Leo: I have to wait until tomorrow!! It’s a
hard knock life.

Gina:Mirium had
one but it was a review unit I think.

Leo: I think review units have gone out on
both the Nexus 6 and 9. But the rumor is, and I don’t think Google has said, we
were hoping to get updates on the Nexus devices, like the 5 and the 7 and the
10 to Lollipop like yesterday. The rumor is that now it will be a week from
today, November 12th, due to bugginess in
Lollipop.

Jeff: Oh, oh.

Leo: Maybe, don’t know.

Jason: You’re going to have to wait.

Leo: I want to see Lollipop.

Jeff: We don’t want to wait. We are important
people.

Leo: One argument for a Motorola phone, even
though now it’s Lenovo, is that now Motorola has promised that the X’s and the
Turbo and all of this will be updated to Lollipop as soon as they can. Gina,
did they not release the source code in the AOSP on Monday?

Gina: They did. It’s out in AOSP, which is
good news for everybody.

Leo: What does that mean? Tell us why that’s
great news.

Gina: It means that anyone that does any sort
of mods can start rebasing their work on top of AOSP, so like Cyanogen Mod, or
all the big manufacturers can start porting their skins and dodads and apps over to Lollipop, making sure that it works. Custom ROM’s, all that
stuff, developers can get that code and start working on it. So just means that
on the one plus one, we’re going to get Lollipop. I thin kthey said 90 days.

Leo: Whoa, that takes a while.

Gina: Ninety days from the latest from the
AOSP drops, so 90 days from Monday. Not bad.

Leo: So that’s because it’s a Cyanogen Mod,
CM11, and so Cyanogen gets the source code, like they are working on it right
now.

Gina: Right, exactly.

Leo: But they have to modify it. It’s pretty
heavily modified, isn’t it?

Jason: Yeah, it’s a big difference.

Leo: I still like the OnePlus.
I think the OnePlus in many respects is the phone to
get, especially for the price is the phone to get.

Gina: Yeah, I love it.

Jason: Some interesting similarities right now
between the OnePlus approach to selling their device
and the same type of scarcity/contest for the Nexus 6 right now. It’s almost
like they are playing from the same play book. I don’t know if it’s a good
thing.

Leo: Jeff, you did, you went to the site and
were refreshing it weren’t you? You did that, didn’t you?

Jeff: All morning. Google should put ads on
there just to make more revenue on people refreshing that aren’t paying.

Leo: I feel like I won the lottery.

Jeff: Let me ask you this. The Apple Store that I walked by was at the
Cube on 5th Avenue. There were lines out of the mall. Is this ongoing demand of
the phone?

Leo: Yes, we were talking about this on Sunday that there will still
lines at the Apple Stores to get the iPhone.

Jeff: Is it because it's slow to do the process? Is it because they
didn't have the phones? What is causing that kind of scarcity behavior?

Leo: I don't know in this case. Generally it's because each store gets
a shipment of 100 in the morning so people line up so that they can get those
phones. OnePlus says, according to our chatroom, Runwithscissors says OnePlus says
they have sold 500,000 units.

Jeff: I don't know about that.

Leo: That's pretty good.

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: Given the scarcity and how hard it is to get one. Half a million
phones sold to date according to Lilly Peuting.

Jeff: So I thought my OnePlus was busted last
night. This is a typical Jeff story. The night before last I'm driving home and
I'm trying to call the Italian restaurant to get some chicken parm on the way home, my sad life, and one ring terminates,
two rings terminates, one ring terminates, the guy would come on and say hello
and it would terminate. So I thought it was his phone, some poor guy I called
like 25 times. He's sitting there saying who is this schmuck calling me every
30 seconds? I thought, well, I will try another number. Same
thing. So I get home and I pull up the Nexus 5, I put the SIM in there
and I think okay, I will stick with the Nexus 5. It works like twice and then
same thing, terminate, terminate, terminate.

Leo: So it's your carrier?

Jeff: It's the carrier, it's AT&T, there is
a very nice woman behind AT&T Cares named Jorrie who is trying to help me. I still don't have help. There is another AT&T
Executive who was nice enough to put in an escalation.

Leo: Is it the same locale?

Jeff: It's across 40 miles of New Jersey as well as Manhattan.

Leo: Is it something maybe about the handoff?

Jeff: They were going to upgrade something and it still didn't work. The
point is that I was ready to throw the OnePlusOne out
the window and pull a Jeff Frant. Thank goodness I
didn't because it wasn't the OnePlusOne.

Leo: So this comes from Ewen Spence in
Forbes. He was at the Dublin Web Summit, talked to the OnePlus founder and director Karl Pei, and Karl said that they have passed 500,000
handsets. There is a push to reach a stretch goal of 1 million before the end
of the year. "It's going to be hard" said Pei, "but I think it's
possible." The advertising budget?$300.

Jeff: Wow.

Gina: What?

Leo: Not million, not billion, hundred. All of
that money was spent experimenting on different types of Facebook ads. We found
that we've reached a critical mass of users, we don't
have to buy any more ads. Is that a typo? $300?

Jeff: Right, so the price was the marketing.

Leo: Well, yeah, it worked. I think everybody who has that phone, which
includes you, and Gina, and Father Robert has my OnePlus,
and Jason has aOnePlus, we
all agree; for the $350 that is really a heck of a great phone. It's got a good
camera, it shoots camera raw, Cyanogen Mod is a really
nice version of Android.

Gina: A $300 marketing budget would account for the stupid contest.

Jason: How many times in All About Android have
we discussed how the marketing team was practically asleep when they were
planning these things? Apparently it's because the marketing team doesn't
actually exist.

Gina: They were clearly just high school interns.

Leo: That's fine though, it worked. I think that it's nice that they
showed that you could do something. I think that there would be a lot of
companies that would be very happy with 500,000 sales of a $350 handset.

Jason: Especially for an upstart.

Gina: Yeah, well, right. Reportedly right. I had a Jarvisian moment. A friend of mine called me and said that she had someone else picked up
and who was this and did you just get this number? She said yeah, I just got this
number. So my friend said, oh, did your number change? I said no. She said
that's a little weird. I realized when I went into my Google Voice settings and
looked at my Google Voice number and realized that there was 2 phones which I
no longer have which I forgot to turn off. It just stopped ringing, so I've
been ringing two people's phones on all of my calls. I wondered Leo, you SIM
swap, how do you keep track of all of the phones?

Leo: I still use Google Voice so you can only have 5 phones.

Gina: You are an edge case, you are pushing the
limits of this.

Leo: I have at all times 5 phones on my Google Voice number, but I go
in there at least several times a week to update.

Gina: To deactivate one and turn on another, yeah? Yeah, wow.

Leo: You know that even Verizon now, the SIM card on this one is so weird, you actually have to pull out the voice rucker. It's a little drawer beneath the volume rucker. You pull it out and you just swap the SIM card,
even with Verizon. I don't do Sprint for that reason because with CDMA you have
to call and all of that stuff. With AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon it's just
musical SIM cards.

Gina: And it's not carrier locked. You don't have to call.

Leo: I haven't yet tried that with this phone but I was able to put an
AT&T and T-Mobile SIM in my iPhone. People have told me on Twitter and so
forth that they have a consent agreement with the FCC that says...

Jeff: Don't get me started. This is all back to the Nexus 7. If you use
the LTE Spectrum that they bought, the condition of that spectrum as required
by Google when they bought it in that auction is openness to devices.

Leo: Verizon is actually, against their will, a really good choice. Don't
quote me yet, I will go home and put a T-Mobile SIM and an AT&T SIM in
this. It's a nanoSIM. You don't think it will work? I've
already swapped SIMs with an iPhone and changed the number.

Jeff: I was told it was that whole new SIM thing and that stuff.

Leo: But not on the iPhone, just on the iPad. So this is a CDMA phone,
but because everything is LTE now they use a SIM for LTE.

Jeff: It rolls down to a CDMA?

Leo: I don't know what it fails down to. I don't know. I guess at some
point it would go to 1RTT? I think that is a CDMA technology. It would have to
fail down pretty good, though. Anyway, that's phone talk. We should really
reserve that for All About Android.

Jeff: Somebody yelled at us on Twitter last week. It's supposed to be
about Google, not about phones!

Leo: Well Android is Google gosh diggitydarnit! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to yell. Google has leased
a New York cookie factory in Chelsea.

Jeff: That's the face for a company that is growing too big. They need
more space.

Leo: Really, you have no fears of Google becoming kind of the...

Gina: The Borg?

Leo: The Borg? What's to stop them?

Jeff: I think the market will take care of them if they do.

Leo: That was what Matt was kind of saying that as long as there is
competition you don't have to worry. Google is a monopoly, come on. Right?

Jeff: Not in search. It is in advertising.

Leo: Yeah, well that is where all of the money comes from. They signed
the lease for a 180,000 Nabisco Cookie Factory right
next to the Highline.

Jeff: I was trying to think of a cookie joke and I couldn't come up with
one.

Gina: Yeah, Nabisco. Nabisco had to move to New Jersey so Google is
moving in.

Leo: That's the economy right there in a nut shell.

Gina: Move over Nabisco.

Leo: Move over, here comes Google.

Gina: I visited the New York office once, and they are definitely busted
out of the seams. They have been looking for space in New York I think for a
while.

Jeff: They have the Chelsea, they have the big
old port. If you haven't been to New York you can see that the Port Authority
Building is a complete city block. You just don't see that. It's just gigantic.

Leo: That's where they put all of the bums, right?

Jeff: That's where Google is, plus a couple of other companies. No, no,
no, not the bus thing.

Leo: Not the Port Authority Bus Terminal, oh, okay.

Jeff: It's the old Port Authority office thing downtown. Across from
that is the Chelsea Market which they also took over. Tomorrow night it will go
into the opening of the YouTube New York Studio there. Nearby is the cookie
factory.

Leo: Is this a new studio? By the way, it smells really good in the
Google offices. It smells like Nilla Vanilla Wafers.

Gina: Too late for Gingerbread. There we go, there is our cookie joke.

Leo: There is our cookie joke. Is the YouTube facility in New York new?

Jeff: Yes, it's new. The one studio is in LA, and they are opening one
in New York.

Leo: To me in my mind that was a failed initiative. It's the same thing
when Google spent 100 million dollars to get big brand names to make YouTube
videos for nothing.

Jeff: Susan Wojcicki is the new sheriff in
town trying to find out the new way so I presumed she approved this.

Leo: What benefit has returned to Google from the LA Studio besides
goodwill, which is probably a real benefit, but goodwill with the YouTube video
folks. I don't think that the hot videos on YouTube are suddenly great
production value.

Jeff: No, in a way I don't want YouTube videos to come with production
value. I want them to be fresh, and weird, and different, and small.

Leo: Yeah, it's video of the people.

Jeff: But they will have schwags that won't
go.

Leo: Now she is apparently considering, Susan Wojcicki is considering some sort of subscription model. But they already have a
subscription model. This is something that she was talking about in Re/code
Mobile.

Jeff: They are going prime so that you can get
rid of the ads.

Leo: Oh, an ad free YouTube.

Jeff: She made some reference in there to what if you don't want the
ads.

Leo: I don't want the ads, I will pay for ad
free YouTube.

Jeff: Yeah.

Gina: Yeah, I would too.

Jeff: We had a story last week that the amount of money that YouTube, I
forget, it was like a billion dollars, it was a grossly high amount of money
that they have sent to copyright holders who rather than ask to take their
stuff down said, okay, just share the ad money with us. They distributed a lot
of money. Is there an ad free music streaming model for video now where they
can just split the revenue with copyright holders?

Leo: How much would it have to cost, though? I can't imagine that
YouTube makes more than $5-$10 a month on me.

Jeff: I was at this conference where it is all off the record so they
don't want to talk about it, but the guy who is responsible for Breaking Bad
and all of the shows that we like from AMC and Peter Turn from AMC were all out
there. I won't quote them by name, but the discussion was they call it LVOD I
think it's called, or SVOD. With all of these services are there more Netflix
to come?

Leo: SVOD is subscription video on demand.

Jeff: Thank you. So there is either huge things
like Netflix and Amazon or there are tiny things like Crunchroll Anime. Both can succeed. I think that there will be a lot of opportunities over
the top. Of course what the industry is buzzing about is what HBO and CBS said.
They were going to leave and offer over the top subscriptions for their content
and you didn't have to have a cable subscription. We will see how that works,
and we will see if that works, and how many subscriptions people are willing to
do, and can you succeed without having an operation. Fred Wilson wrote a piece
about podcasts this last week inspired by New York Magazine cover on it and he
put in the last paragraph a thing that I have argued for years that Howard
Stern should go to the internet and go to YouTube which is where I introduced
him to Google 5 years ago. I would pay every month for that. I would pay every
month for the CBS thing because if I can immediately get The Good Wife which I
am addicted to, a little higher scale than your Kardashian addiction Gina.

Gina: Oh, The Good Wife is awesome. I love The Good Wife.

Jeff: Isn't it great?

Gina: It's one of my favorite shows.

Jeff: Oh, I'm addicted. I would pay for HBO on my own. I think that
there would be things that you would pay for. I think the question is is it an omnibus YouTube subscription like Prime or is it
several subscriptions. I have no idea what they would pay.

Leo: That cracks me up that mainstream media has discovered podcasts
and says we are in a renaissance.

Jeff: Yeah.

Leo: What? I think it was the Washington Post that wrote that article
like 3 weeks ago. New York Magazine Kevin Roose just
wrote the same article.

Jeff: Have you listened to Alex Bloomberg’s show?

Leo: By the way, that is why this happened. Alex Bloomberg was a
producer at This American Life which all of the media elite listen to.

Jeff: Exactly.

Leo: He did a podcast about starting a podcast. This was kind of the
thing that happened when we started was that we were all talking about
podcasting all of the time. Welcome to the 21st Century Alex. Apparently
because everybody listens to that everybody said that podcasts were making
money. By the way Alex only makes money because he had a Kickstarter. He's not
making any real money on that.

Jeff: Well, he has ads on it. He has Mailchimp on it.

Leo: We have Mailchimp.

Jeff: The reason that I like his podcast is because it's the same thing
that all of my students go through starting a company. They think this, they
learn that, they think this, they learn that. It's what Alex is going through
very transparently.

Leo: I'm so glad that there is a renaissance. Finally we can make some
money on this.

Jeff: Oh yeah. Where have you been all of my life people?

Leo: There have been all of these articles and none of them have ever
asked me. I would say what do you mean renaissance
because we have been up since 2005. What are you talking about?

Jeff: I don't think people think you are a podcast company Leo.

Leo: Yeah, well they are wrong. I mean, I'm not, I don't use the word
podcast, but what do they think I do? There will be a piece on us on
Marketplace tomorrow I'm told.

Gina: That's awesome.

Leo: And NPR is doing a piece on the podcast renaissance and I think
that they are going to quote me because the reporter John Kaslish interviewed me. I hope they have a piece of me saying what are you talking
about?

Gina: You have a little bit of experience here. I think that you are a
good person to talk to Leo.

Leo: I know a little bit about it.

Gina: You know a little bit about it.

Leo: Now this has always been the problem kind of about what we do. We
are going to get preferential so I won't do it for too long, but just for a
second. What is this that we do? What is this that we do? I don't know. I don't
know what we do. It's internet shows, which is what
I've always said. I said don't call it a podcast because it doesn't go on an
iPod. It's not what we do. Some people are watching live like TV. Some people
listen in their car, that's like a podcast but it's not the only thing that we
do.

Jeff: They are talking right now to us and that is like nothing that
we've seen before.

Gina: It's true, I can't even explain it. I say that I do a show and
people are like you do a show? It's like yeah, it's a show, it's on the web, it's video, it's live but it's also recorded. It's hard to
explain. People get the idea with podcasts that it's like a few friends hanging out or Skyping and record it. But this is much more than
that and it has that component. You never use the word podcast which I think
maybe makes you defy categorization Leo which is maybe why you are not like the
go to person for these conversations.

Leo: I don't mind if they quote me, but it is ironic that they think
that there is some sort of renaissance.

Jeff: I think that you are reinventing TV. I still say this is
television.

Leo: Yeah, it's more like TV than a podcast, whatever. Our show today
is brought to you by...

Jeff: I'm going to take my ball and go home.

Gina: I like that transition.

Leo: It just cracks me up, it's like what do you mean renaissance?

Gina: It's just because yeah.

Jeff: Yeah.

Leo: Oh now because somebody from the media establishment is doing a
podcast it must be a renaissance. That's actually what bothers me, is that
whatever we does has no credibility unless it comes
from the media establishment, and then, now, oh, it's serious. Go tell that to
Marc Maron. Go tell that to Adam Corolla. There are
so many people that have being doing this, whatever it is called, successfully
for 10 years almost; we are going to celebrate our 10th anniversary next year
in April.

Gina: That's amazing.

Leo: But there is a renaissance. It's TV with buffering. Thank you Keith.

Jeff: You still haven't answered the question. Have you listened to...

Leo: Alex's podcast? No.

Jeff: It would drive you crazy.

Leo: I should listen to it I guess.

Jeff: I think they have done a good job. I think that you will enjoy
it.

Leo: I don't listen to a lot of podcasts because I like my audiobooks,
but I listen to a few. I listen to American Life, it
is one of the great radio shows of all time. It's not a podcast, it's just a radio show that they also offer online.

Gina: Right, they distribute it as such. They distribute it as a
podcast, yeah.

Leo: Anyway, I don't know what it is. Kevin Smith, there is another one
who has been doing this for a long time. Our show today is brought to you by,
this is what is exciting about the internet, it is
reinventing traditional businesses. Prosper is a good example. They are
reinventing the bank loan. You don't have to go into a bank to get a loan from
Prosper. Prosper is a marketplace, it brings together people who have money to
lend with people who want to borrow money. It's very successful, they have now more than a billion dollars in loans funded and 2 million
members, lenders and borrowers alike. It's pretty amazing. The other thing is
that it is friction free. That's what is great about the internet. Imagine,
without ever walking into a bank, that you could have in the next 3 days
$35,000 to cover your bills. Would you pay off high rate credit cards, or maybe
do a little home improvement, build a podcast network? All you have got to do
is fill out an easy online application just like you are seeing on the screen
if you are watching on video. This will not affect your credit. They ask for a
very minimal amount of personal information and you will get your rate almost
instantly online. Prosper offers low fixed rates, these are unsecured personal loans so there is no collateral. They do have
multi year terms. It really is an awesome way to borrow money. There are no
outrageous fees, no rising interest rates, and no bank. Prosper.com/twit, that is what you need to know. You don't even have to
put on your pants. Prosper is offering TWiT viewers
for a limited time a $50 Visa prepaid card when you get a loan from the
website. Prosper.com/twit, get that loan and the $50 Visa prepaid card.

In some ways I feel guilty because we do look a little like old
media, in fact our model is very old media like. Maybe what TWiT does is not really significant, the only thing different is...

Jeff: Oh, no, no, no, it's very significant.

Leo: Oh thank you. I was kind of fishing for that one, wasn't I?

Gina: We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you.

Leo: It's significant in a couple of ways. Internet distribution of
television was supposedly what was going to happen 10 years ago.

Jeff: It's not just that, it also is the forum. You've reinvented the
relationship with the audience.

Leo: This is kind of like the McLaughlin Group.

Jeff: McLaughlin wouldn't have tolerated a chatroom.

Leo: No, I would like to see that.

Jeff: They were raging idiots.

Leo: You fools. Wrong, you are wrong, all of
you are wrong. Let's do the Google change log, shall we?

(Intro Plays)

Leo: Gina Trapani has the latest from Google.

Gina: Well, the good news about Lollipop dropping soon is that we are
seeing overhauls of all of Google's proprietary apps for Android. We've got
three of them today, Maps, Gmail, and Calendar. They are all getting the
material design Lollipop love. So Google Maps update is rolling out now. New material design layouts focusing on bright colors, real world
surfaces, and shadows. They added a couple of new features too; dinner
reservations from Open Table that you can make from right in Maps. That's US
only. They have better looking information cards with photos and reviews of
popular attractions near your location. Sorry, this is actually set to roll out
over the next few days. Google Maps also has support for Uber pickup times and fares only if you have the Uber App
installed. Gmail's material design upgrade is also rolling out. I haven't side
loaded this yet. You can side load the ADK, the production signed Google
version is out. You can find that at Android Police. It should be going out
over the air through the Play Store soon. The material design
makeover for Gmail with Exchange, and POP, and iMap support. You can get all of your email in the native Gmail App. From
what I hear it is very, very similar to Inbox. Google Calendar is also getting
the big material design overhaul with a few new features. It is getting events
from Gmail so now you can turn emails into calendar events automatically so if
you get an invitation to something that will show up right on your calendar. Something
that I think they are calling in Google Calendar assists. These are suggestions
that save you time. So the Calendar can suggest titles, people, and places as
you type. If you often say go running with a friend named Jason in Central
Park, Calendar will suggest that event to you if you just type run. So it
learns as you use it. It's got this new schedule view that is very in line with
material design focus of big images that includes photos and maps of places you
are going, and cityscapes and illustrations of everyday events like coffee,
yoga, that kind of thing. The new Calendar is available right now on all
devices running Lollipop. You will be able to download the update on other
devices from Google Play in the upcoming weeks. This update is actually going
to go out to IOS. Those are the three big Lollipop / material design updates. A
couple of other new things, Google Drive now lets you
open files in compatible Mac and PC apps with the new Chrome extension. This
new Chrome extension is called Application Launcher for Drive. You can search
that in the Chrome web store. It allows you to open files directly from its
Google Drive service in compatible apps on the Mac or PC. So basically the
extension adds an open with option that will let you launch a file so that you
are looking at Drive in IOS Xs preview app or third
party editing apps like Adobe or Microsoft.

Jeff: Jane, stop this crazy thing.

Gina: What's that?

Jeff: I said Jane, stop this crazy thing. It's going around, and around,
and around, and around.

Gina: Cloud at the desktop. We had a looping animated GIF there
displaying how it works. Let's see, what else? Oh, I haven't used a Roku in a
while, but Roku just got a new Google Play Movies and TV app.

Leo: It's so awesome.

Gina: Yeah, pretty cool. I think this is the first time that we are
seeing Google Movies and TV somewhere other than on Android, right?

Leo: I think so.

Gina: Yeah, making its debut in the Roku Channel Store is Google Play
Movies and TV, which of course is the app that lets you buy and rent videos. It's
pretty standard video focused application. The one feature that Play Movies and
TV has, which is pretty cool, is that those info cards
related to content that you are watching. If you press pause on an actor in a
scene you can see who it is and get information about that person. So it's a
really neat feature. You will get that on Roku as well. Finally, Google has
quietly launched the Stars interface for Google Bookmark. We've seen a couple
of rumors about this which we've talked about a couple of times. A screenshot
leaked of this new bookmarking feature called Stars. That's gone live. Google
really didn't make a big deal or announcement about it, but it's in the Chrome
Web Store now, it's called the Chrome Bookmark Manager. The Nexreb reports that this completely replaces Chrome's old bookmark's interface. The
idea of Stars is to make saving bookmarks really easy, organizing them very
quickly and automatically, it's smart enough actually to go through all of your
bookmarks and organize them into automatically generated categories based on
what you've got in there. If you are one of those people who just collects bookmarks, and I have been that person over the
years, this sounds like it is worth taking a look at. That's the Chrome
Bookmark Manager.

Jeff: Gina, what do you search for? I couldn't find it.

Leo: I installed it.

Gina: Let me see if the TechCrunch article has the direct link. Let me
make sure that...

Leo: It's just called bookmark manager in my thing.

Gina: Yep.

Leo: Here it is, it says Bookmark Manager from
Google.

Gina: Yep, Bookmark Manager by Google.

Leo: This is it.

Jeff: It's an extension?

Leo: It's an extension.

Gina: It's an extension so it's in the Chrome Web Store.

Jeff: Oh, it's an extension.

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: I still don't see it.

Gina: It's so amazing when they have a new app or extension in the web
store, and you search for it and it doesn't come up. It sometimes takes time
for it to show up in the search results which is so ironic.

Leo: It's kind of Pinteresty.

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: It Pinterest's your bookmarks. I like it.

Gina: Yeah, I haven't had a whole lot of time with it myself, but you are liking it?

Leo: Yeah, I haven't done it on this machine. You can see that it's
churning on my bookmarks. It's going to reorganize them for me. Churn, churn,
churn, churn, churn, there is nothing to see here, just a dot.

Leo: Don't type that in kids, because I think I got some of the letters
wrong.

Gina: So yeah, that's all I have got in the change log.

Leo: And that is the Google Change Log. What do we think of Lollipop? There
is material, and all of these new materialized apps. I realize that Google
Inbox is a materialized app as well. I like the look, but that is just a look. Or
does it really change how you use stuff?

Gina: You know, I think it is more the interactions. So I haven't played
with Lollipop. I didn't load any of the early builds, I just wanted to be totally surprised.

Leo: Me too.

Gina: I wanted to get the whole first impression. From what I have seen
it's just more around interaction, like smoother interaction. Things slide, and
bounce, and are spring loaded, and very responsive. I think that that is more
than just a visual refresh. I think it is a feel thing.

Leo: I also think that it is very interesting what Calendar is doing,
and Bookmarks is doing, and of course Inbox is doing, this idea of it's too
much trouble for you to organize your stuff so we will do it for you.

Gina: Yeah, it feels like Google Now is kind of infiltrating, you know,
like Inbox has these kind of Google Now smarts about you know remind me later
and group these things together. Now we are seeing Calendar adding things to
the Calendar from Gmail. It's this integration of all of these things and it's
like we will do it for you because we know best. At first is going to freak
people out, but once you surrender and let it happen you will realize that you
know, I don't want to waste my time transcribing an event from my Gmail to my
calendar, it makes no sense. So like the efficiencies that we were talking
about earlier. It's really neat to see the Now stuff with the Wear stuff, with
the material design stuff with the Lollipop stuff all sort of land at the same
time. This is a really neat, interesting time.

Jeff: Let correct something from last week. Last week I said that the
new Drive didn't have a store offline. I got corrected on Google + right away,
and it was very helpful, and in fact it does it even better. You don't have to
remember to do it, you just go into preferences and
say store offline. You don't have to do it before you get on the plane, it will
always store offline. It's great.

Leo: Particularly for Chromebook users obviously.

Jeff: For anybody with sense.

Leo: For anybody with sense? Is that what you said.

Jeff: In the Cloud.

Leo: Any intelligent person.

Jeff: Or anybody with trust issues Leo. Who believes in the future in
technology and is okay with a benevolent company that brings it to us.

Leo: See, that's the thing. There is going to be a point at which, and
everybody is different, Jeff will never feel like it's creepy, but there is a
point for everyone where it goes to do I really want them to know who I run
with all of the time?

Jeff: There are creepy lines for everybody.

Leo: Yes, it's nicely convenient that I can type run and that means
that you are going to go out with Kevin at 4:00 this afternoon to run Central
Park. I understand the value of that, but don't you think that's a little
creepy that it knows that, that it's keeping track of that?

Jeff: It won't know exactly why. The creepiness comes from the not
knowing why, the mystery of it.

Leo: Creepiness comes from probably an antamorphazation of it. That it's a human doing it maybe.

Gina: Yeah, if I left for work at 8:30 every morning, and one morning my
neighbor showed up at my gate with a cup of coffee, and handed it to me, and
said I noticed that you go to work at this exact time every day and you stop
for coffee but I thought here, I will just bring it to you. I would be grateful
and yet weirded out.

Leo: It depends on if he looked at you like that. I brought you some
coffee. You want some coffee? I put 2 Splenda in just like you like.

Gina: Have a good day Gina.

Leo: That wouldn't be good. I'm a little too good at that.

Gina: You know, but then this past week Google Now let me know that I
had to change my clocks, Google Now let me know where my local polling place
was, it was like, okay, yeah.

Leo: It just told me who got elected as my representative. That's kind
of cool. It tells me what the PG&E bill is.

Gina: Oh yeah, yeah, I've gotten that one too.

Leo: Well it's good for me because I always forget to pay it.

Jeff: Well in your case you used to forget to pay them so Google is
helping you.

Leo: In fact, it would be nice if Google would just pay it. Would you,
Google? It's only $7. Just pay it.

Gina: It will be like pay with wallet.

Leo: It will be like when you go to the toll booth and the toll guy is
like, hey the guy ahead of you just paid. Every once in a while Google, just
pay a bill for me, will you? Just every once in a while.

Jeff: That would be a great PR thing for them to do. It would be funny. We
picked out some people and we paid a bill for each of them.

Leo: Hey, if you were a Canadian woman and you would like more people
to see your boobs probably the best thing to do would be to sue Google for
showing your boobs in Street View.

Gina: Every story that has reported it showed the photo.

Leo: First of all, Maria Pia Grillo was
sitting on her stoop of her house in public. She wasn't naked, she just had a low cut thing on. I'm not going to show it because I don't want
to pander. But the Street View car goes by, takes a picture of her...

Gina: It was not a flattering angle. It was maybe an angle that she
wouldn't have, yeah.

Leo: It's the angle of the dangle. That's really the problem.

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: Now they blurred her face because they always do, but they didn't
blur her boobs. Not even her boobs, her cleavage. 2 years later she sues Google
to blur the rest of her as well as her license plate and address. I guess I
kind of understand that if she is getting hey, you want some coffee? She
demanded $45,000 for emotional damage including depression and mockery from her
coworkers at a "well known bank" where she worked.

Jeff: The problem is with all of those ass h's
coworkers, not Google.

Leo: Yeah. Google agreed to blur out more of the image, in fact they
blurred out not only her but the whole house now. She's like blurmany. She lives in blurmany. But
they said, hey, you were in a public place, we don't have to give you any
money. The judge said that the Street View incident, while causing a shock for Grillo, didn't appear to be directly connected to the
mental conditions that she claimed. He also wondered why she waited 2 years to
sue, but, and this may be more important, the judge rejected Google's public
place defense and said that people do not forfeit their privacy rights simply
by being in a location that others can see them.

Jeff: That is just so wrong. That is a shiv to the heart of
journalism.

Leo: You are in public.

Jeff: You are in public. If we now degrade what we define as public then
we steal that from the public. Somebody I know wrote a book about that.

Leo: I thought you might have something to say about this. There is the
Streisand effect which is that now everybody has seen them.

Gina: Isn't the public bathroom expectation of privacy issue if you are
sitting on your front steps in a bikini top? No? I don't know.

Leo: It's not quite a public bathroom. You are on your front steps.

Jeff: I say that it's different. If she were in the back yard with a
fence and a drone comes over and takes a picture of her that's wrong, that's
private. She is sitting in front of a public building, anyone can walk by and
take a picture of that building and they can take it with whatever notoriety. I
was going to say that being on the internet, but being on Street View, no I'm
sorry, I've got a hold tight to defending what is public is public.

Leo: I would say that I think she has the right to go to Google and say
blur that out would you? And they did. She did win an award, a few thousand
dollars, not all of the money that she asked for.

Gina: 2 grand, yeah.

Leo: But you see what this leads to? A pianist now wants a bad review
taken down under the right to be forgotten.

Jeff: He wants it, but it didn't happen.

Gina: What was the image that Boing Boing chose?

Leo: I think it was a crying baby. DejanLazic got a mildly critical review in 2010 in the
Washington Post and he doesn't want anybody to see it.

Jeff: But he didn't go to Google, which is actually smarter, he went
right to the source and tried to argue this as a right and tried to have the
Washington Post take it down.

Leo: Which, of course, they laughed at that. Right?

Jeff: Right.

Leo: So is he going to go on to Google now?

Jeff: If the right to be forgotten extends too far it becomes that.

Leo: Right. I'd love it if I got all of the bad reviews of our show
taken down.

Jeff: I just want to take away the computers of a few trolls and then
life is fine.

Leo: Then life would be good. You can't stop trolls but you can get a
bad review taken down. So the Post did not take it down? Alright, like zuhnzuesschreck.
You want to give us an update on the status of the German?

Jeff: Real quick, so when last we met this soap opera a couple things
had happened. Basically the publishers seemed to lose, but Axel Springer
decided to keep a couple of his brands out of snippets. Two weeks later they
come along and they so oh, we surrender, we have lost so much business, we too want you to take the snippets Google. Of
course I don't think that it's as simple as it seems, I think that it is
Springer arguing see, Google is too powerful. They hurt our business unless we
have the snippets. Though, in the article I linked to the writers pointed out
that Google is bringing value to the publishers and for free. So one could
argue that Google should be charging the publishers for the traffic it sends
but of course they don't do that. So this soap opera goes on. At the same time
we have Intenger, the new EU head of digital stuff who
is talking about having his own similar law across all of the EU and since last we spoke Spain did indeed pass the link tax.

Leo: They did?

Jeff: Yes, and you can no opt out of it so you can't say, never mind,
don't pay me for the links. You can't do that, it even effects academics. It's abhorred in so many ways. I can't believe that it will in the
long run be sustained by EU rules, but who knows. It's a law on the books and
it's an incredibly stupid and dangerous law.

Leo: So tell me exactly what happens.

Jeff: Link tax?

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: If aggregators, curators, etc., if they use links they have to pay
in per link to a fund and somehow or another, it's uncertain, it will be
distributed to the copyright holders who are so harmed by receiving this
traffic.

Leo: So it's really pretty much a tax on Google, right?

Jeff: Yes, it's a Google tax, but it's a tax on links so it affects
others. I was at an event last night speaking to foreign CEOs and stuff, and
the guy who was before me was from Buzzfeed. I'm
talking about this and he was saying oh. I said, watch out fella.

Leo: Can I get taxed by Spain if I link on a show note on twit.tv to a
Spanish source?

Jeff: I don't know how this goes. Again, the other thing is like it's
like the right to be forgotten. It's like the presumption of privacy in public.
Once you have dealt with this as a principal then you have no idea how it is
going to be extended.

Leo: Wow.

Jeff: When I was in Spain I got some press attention.

Leo: You did, you were on the front page.

Jeff: No, I was in El Mundo, I was in
Extension. It's fun, I can't read it but...

Leo: I like the picture. Did they take that or is it a file photo?

Jeff: They took that. They took that.

Leo: That's nice. You look angry.

Jeff: But while I am doing this terrible ego thing I did make the front
page in Korea.

Gina: You look very authoritative.

Leo: What does it say about you?

Jeff: I have no idea. I did worry about the headlines at the airport
when I saw them. I pulled out the Google app and you can just mark the text
that you want and it did translate it. It's pretty cool.

Leo: What did it say? Do you remember? Brilliant professor explains how
internet works to rapt students.

Gina: I like that one.

Leo: I'm writing that one. Let's get that in 18 point type in the back
of Wall Street Journal.

Jeff: Yeah, so it's more danger in Europe folks. It's not good, and my argument
to Europe, I wrote a 3000 word essay about this. So far I haven't been able to
place it in German media about the German problem. If any of you are watching
and have some help for me let me know. Certain major publications that start
with F, and end with Z, and have an A in the middle should have run it because
they have run 8,000 word attacks on me, but they wouldn't run it. My argument
to Europeans is watch out, you are now being seen very closely as an
environment that is hostile to technology, innovation, and investments.

Leo: You don't want that.

Jeff: Nope, nope. If I were investing in a company, if I were starting a
company, would I do it in Europe? Absolutely not right now.

Leo: Let's take a break. When we come back, your tip,
your tool, your number of the week. Ladies and gentlemen, as we wrap
this puppy up our show today is brought to you by the brand new Squarespace. Squarespace 7 is out
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gorgeous new website. Let's start, this is a good one, get ready, start your
engines, Gina Trapani's tip of the week.

Gina: This is literally just for people who are watching now or hear
this in the next hour. It's Inbox happy hour starting in 9 minutes at 3:00 pm
Pacific time. What do you have to do? You want an Inbox invite, you have to
send an email to inbox@google.com between 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm Pacific time
today and you will get your invite by 5:00 pm. Send it from your Gmail account.

Jeff: Are they going to send people phones?

Gina: That's what they need to do, it has
nothing to do with phones. Sorry to folks who are time shifting, this is only good starting in 9 minutes for an hour.

Leo: That's great. Chris is running over. Everybody on my staff is
running over. You gotta wait 8 minutes before you
send that email. As Gina says, use your Gmail email address because that is the
one that will get the invite.

﻿Gina: ﻿Yeah.

﻿Jeff: ﻿Oh yeah.

﻿Leo: ﻿Do we love Inbox?

﻿Gina: ﻿Yes.

﻿Leo: ﻿Two thumbs up. Jeff is
not...

﻿Jeff: ﻿I just don't use it enough.
One odd thing is that the alerts on my watch from Inbox are the Gmail alerts. Gmail
alerts I can actually read most of the email, but the Inbox alerts just say,
oh, you've got mail. Of course I do.

﻿Leo: ﻿This is Lollipop, right? It's
material design, even on the web. That's one nice thing by the way, it's Android, IOS, and Web. I love that. I have been
Inbox zero ever since it came out.

﻿Jeff: ﻿Oh shut up.

﻿Gina: ﻿Nice, good for you.

﻿Jeff: ﻿Between that and your 2
minute commute I just hate you.

﻿Leo: ﻿And my 18 smartphones. Wow. Anyway, great, really great. So you have 1 hour, they will
accept all emails that come in, and they will send you an invite by 5:00 pm.

﻿Gina: ﻿Not bad.

﻿Leo: ﻿So Inbox, for those who
don't know, is still Gmail, it's a new interface to Gmail that is free. Of
course, if you don't use Gmail it's of no use to you. It's Google's attempt to
really reinvent how you process email and it does a great job. Everything that
you do in Inbox is reflected in your Gmail so that you can go back and forth
fluidly and easily. You are not abandoning.

﻿Jeff: ﻿If you use email elsewhere
you can pop it into Gmail and start using it. It doesn't have to come from
there. If you have company email don't worry, you can still use company email.

﻿Leo: ﻿In fact, create a Gmail
account and just pick up the mail in Gmail and then you will be able to use it.
Then you get Gmail's filtering, there are so many great benefits. What they
have done, which I really like, is they, I need to find out what the markup is
for this because you will get actionable calendar invites in the preview.

﻿Gina: ﻿They published the markup
for that, it's pretty cool. There are like action buttons and like invitations.
It's really nice.

﻿Leo: ﻿It just makes it so much
easier. Alright Jeff, what is your number of the week?

﻿Jeff: ﻿So I saw an uh oh headline.
I saw the Wall Street Journal had about peaking Android. I said uh oh, but what
they said was that Android represented 84% of the shipments last quarter, down
1% from 85%. They probably won't get any bigger than 85%, but there is plenty
of market to go, so I'm not concerned.

﻿Leo: ﻿Is this in the US?

﻿Jeff: ﻿Oh, you had to ask me a
question.

﻿Leo: ﻿84% of all devices shipped
last quarter were Android devices. I guess you could get to 100%, but no.

﻿Gina: ﻿Globally.

﻿Leo: ﻿Globally, wow. It's
different in the US, it's probably not more than 50%
in the US, but 84% of all smartphones shipped globally in Q3 were Android. Actually
that is down because it was 85% in Q2.

﻿Jeff: ﻿Yeah, so it's 1% down. I
was saying who cares?

﻿Leo: ﻿Apple, globally again, 12%,
Windows Phone 3%, Blackberry 1%.

﻿Jeff: ﻿Oh, poor Blackberry. They
owned the world once. Nokia isn't even in there.

﻿Leo: ﻿That's pretty amazing. Nokia
is, that's Microsoft.

﻿Jeff: ﻿The days when those brands
ruled the world.

﻿Leo: ﻿Yeah, Sony Erikkson. Remember them? I have to give you more detail to
come, but I have to say the Turbo, the Droid Turbo if you are a Verizon
customer is gonna be my tool of the week. It really
is, I think, a very nice phone. I love this metallic glass back with Kevlar
reinforced. So go ahead, shoot at me. It's a bullet proof phone. The battery
life, again I can't give you the exact because I've only had it for a day, but
it seems to be much better than even my Note 4 which is a ginormous battery. I
love that it is pretty much pure, it is the Motorola experience and I like it.

﻿Jason: ﻿Here, let me try and shoot
at you. Is it okay? Is it okay?

﻿Leo: ﻿You killed my phone, but
I'm okay. It's Kevlar, which is the same material that they use for bullet
proof stuff. Thank you everybody. Thank you Gina, I think that we got you out
of here in time.

﻿Gina: ﻿Thank you, this was a lot
of fun. It was great to have Matt on and I love doing the show.

﻿Leo: ﻿I love Matt. Gina Trapani
is at thinkup.com. That is the place to get insights into your social
interactions both Facebook and Twitter. I am a proud and happy member of ThinkUp.

﻿Gina: ﻿Oh, thank you Leo.

﻿Leo: ﻿Now I am getting ThinkUp insights on my Android Wear watch.

﻿Gina: ﻿Yes, we are rolling out a Twitterbot that will at reply you. It's actually Twitter
notice that you are getting on your watch.

﻿Leo: ﻿That's awesome.

﻿Gina: ﻿Let me know if any of them
are annoying, or don't make sense, or whatever and we
are actually tweeting that right now.

﻿Leo: ﻿Is this a new insight? What's
new with Anil Dash? Is that like a new insight? Anil is her co-founder.

﻿Gina: ﻿It's our bios tracker. There
should be a dif there that shows the difference.

﻿Leo: ﻿Before and after.

﻿Gina: ﻿Yeah.

﻿Leo: ﻿It's not just that Anil is
her partner.

﻿Gina: ﻿No, you follow him.

﻿Leo: ﻿I do.

﻿Gina: ﻿I think that he made a
change to his bio, so that's why you see that.

﻿Leo: ﻿LOL activity detected. It's
like Leo Leporte found one thing LOL worthy in the
last month. So is that because I used LOL in my tweets?

﻿Leo: ﻿You can see, it's so much fun. It's so much fun to play with. Jeff
Jarvis is a Professor of Journalism at the City University of New York, they
call it CUNY. We love him. He can also be read in his brand new book which is
called "Geeks Bearing Gifts". Where can I get "Geeks Bearing Gifts"?

﻿Jeff: ﻿Well, I will put the links
up on my blog tomorrow. You can get it at Amazon we are selling this version
and I will be putting it up on Medium shortly.

﻿Leo: ﻿Actually Amazon has a Ted
Nelson book of the same name, so let's go somewhere else.

﻿Jeff: ﻿Really?

﻿Leo: ﻿Yeah.

﻿Jeff: ﻿Luckily you can't copyright
a title.

﻿Leo: ﻿There is also "Geeks
Bearing Gifts - Paranormal Dating Agency #2". It's apparently a romance. I
think you should have used this cover Jeff. It would have sold so much better. Oh,
I lost it now. Wow, it's a Milly Taden best seller. "Geeks Bearing Gifts". Actually that's just geek
singular. Anyway, you can find it. So you said it is available on Amazon?

﻿Jeff: ﻿Yeah, not yet on Kindle,
but it is available through Amazon.

﻿Leo:﻿ Is it a long one?

﻿Jeff: ﻿It's 200 pages.

﻿Leo: ﻿It's like a real book.

﻿Jeff: ﻿It's like a real book, but
it's wordy, it's wonky, it's about news in media. My editor always begged me
never to write this, but it's what I do.

﻿Leo: ﻿It sounds like something
that I have to read. Yes?

﻿Jeff: ﻿I don't know.

﻿Leo: ﻿I believe I am in the media
and I do news, so I am going to read it. You are the moony eyed leader of the
information must be freed imperative. Did you know that? Just Google Jeff
Jarvis for a fun filled trip down memory lane. Thank you Jeff, thank you Gina,
thank you everybody for being here. We do This Week in Google every Wednesday
1:00 pm Pacific, 4:00 pm Eastern Time, that would be 2100 UTC on twit.tv. Watch
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